As the final sitting fortnight of 2013 began, a curiously embattled Tony Abbott knew he had little choice but to take a deep breath and effectively admit his plan to ditch the Gonski school funding model was a broken promise.

That is the effect of Monday's announcement.

It was necessary because days of dismal ''word games'' by the Prime Minister and his unfeasibly cocky Education Minister Christopher Pyne had only made things worse.

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Suddenly, talk in the corridors of power had turned to the unthinkable - that Abbott's could be a one-term affair after all despite a thumping majority and the odium of Rudd-Gillard Labor.

The opposition, which should have been struggling against a dominant new government, was instead on top of Abbott and Pyne on the issue. It needed only to juxtapose the words of the two men before the election, and their inept dissembling since.

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It was an open-and-shut case of political deception but it lurched into the downright offensive on Sunday when Abbott declared he would be bound only by the promises he had made, not by those promises that people, through their own fault, had thought he had made. It was an egregious blunder ranking right up there with John Howard's notorious core versus non-core promises, and his own previous stipulation that he could be held to account only for written promises rather than spoken ones.

Abbott's covenant that he would lead a government of plain-speaking honesty that would say what it meant and then do what it had said, had not lasted three months.

Given Abbott's sudden ''unity ticket'' on schools just before the election, Monday's return to that position was a backflip on a backflip.

It revealed a worryingly ramshackle approach to policymaking in the new government, which suggested that what had taken two years or more to design, had been undone in as many minutes and then reconstituted in a couple of hours again, when the political ramifications became clear.

Honesty has been in short supply in this tawdry process.

Pyne first feigned surprise at the ''missing'' $1.2 billion, which he then had to admit he had known about from the pre-election economic and fiscal outlook before the election. He had used that faux revelation - and some missing signatures - as the justification for dumping the whole model initially, nominating the old Howard-era socio-economic status formula as the starting point for a new system.

Then he denied that would be the new foundation. As the furore grew, he suddenly found a fresh $230 million from somewhere for the non-signatory jurisdictions, before the final capitulation on Monday. Where is the $1.2 billion coming from? Neither Pyne nor Abbott will say. That will be revealed in the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook after Parliament rises for the year.

If this is how the government handles itself when it is in a dominant position, it does not augur well for its performance under real pressure.